


Summer Holiday

by bluebeholder



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Established Relationship, F/F, Growing Old Together, Tender and Starchy, shameless flirting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-06
Updated: 2016-03-06
Packaged: 2018-05-25 00:26:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6172747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluebeholder/pseuds/bluebeholder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Minerva and Poppy go on their summer holiday together. Old romantics, the both of them, very much in love with each other. </p>
<p>Written for the Kiss Your Girl movement.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Summer Holiday

**Author's Note:**

> [Prompt:](http://femslashbb.livejournal.com/12935.html?thread=166535#t166535) Harry Potter, Minerva McGonagall/Poppy Pomfrey, summer holidays
> 
> Never thought I'd write for Harry Potter, or for this pairing. But life is just full of surprises, isn't it? 
> 
> Beta reader credits go to my lovely friend K, who managed to prevent me from sending out a work that has incomplete lines of dialogue.

The last of the chattering students, freed for the holidays, disappeared into the warm light of the green summer afternoon. From the top of the steps, Headmistress Minerva McGonagall watched them go. The childish figures grew smaller and smaller as they made their way down to the carriages that would take them to the Hogwarts Express, back to their ordinary lives. Their laughter faded away. The doors of the entrance hall shut with a quiet bang, and the only sound was the whisper of dust drifting down from the rafters to collect on Filch’s polished floors. 

Minerva turned from the entrance hall and went up through the castle, listening to the sounds of the last professors tidying their classrooms. Filch and the house elves would soon be at work straightening all the things that the students had put out of place. Madam Pince would be in the library, shelving the last books and writing out fine slips to send to students who had neglected to return their books before leaving the castle. Neville Longbottom would be puttering about in the greenhouses, making certain that the charms to keep the plants green would hold over the summer. Hagrid would be seeing to the carriages. It was time for even the teachers to go home.

She stopped at the infirmary doors, pushing them gently open. The room’s customary occupant was nowhere to be seen. “Poppy?”

“Here, Minerva,” the nurse said, stepping out of her office. She had eschewed her usual wimple already, and her gray-going-to-white hair glinted gold in the light streaming in through the windows. “I was just filing the last student records.”

“What a lovely way to spend the first day of summer,” Minerva said dryly. “Have you finished?”

Poppy smiled. “Let me get my things,” she said, stepping back into the office and pulling out a large trunk. “To the usual place?”

“Of course,” Minerva said. “What’s the point in changing things now?” 

Holding her trunk tightly with one hand, Poppy took hold of Minerva’s arm with the other. Side-Along Apparition was the best method of getting quickly off the grounds of Hogwarts, since, as Headmistress, Minerva could Apparate at will within the castle walls. With Poppy secure, Minerva turned deliberately in place. There was that momentary and familiarly uncomfortable sensation of being pulled through a hose, and then they were standing on the doorstep of a cottage on a cliffside on the south Devon coast. 

Poppy’s trunk went into the bedroom. Minerva unpacked her own bag—a smallish satchel on which she had place certain extension charms—and changed from her usual severe black school robes to something more comfortable. 

They went out for a walk on the beach, going down a set of steps that they had long ago Transfigured into the cliff. It was a perfect day to go, warm and breezy, the air smelling of the sea. 

“How soon do you go back to London?” Poppy asked. 

“Not for some time, I think,” Minerva said. “There is very little these days which requires the attention of the Headmistress of Hogwarts.”

Poppy smiled, taking Minerva’s hand. “For which I, at least, am profoundly grateful.”

Minerva shook her head. “Old romantic,” she said with a smile.

“If I am, so are you, even if your sour-lemon face pretends otherwise,” Poppy said. She tried to look stern and matronly, but her smile escaped anyway. 

“That ‘sour-lemon face’ is the dignity of age, I will have you know,” Minerva said, turning her nose in the air with all the arrogance and air of a Malfoy or a Rosier. 

She watched Poppy out of the corner of her eye. The other woman rolled her eyes. “Oh, yes, it has nothing to do with the years you’ve spent scowling at students like some awful Muggle depiction of a warty green witch.”

Minerva mock-glared at Poppy. “They’re more terrified of you than they ever were of me. You make them do things like drink Pepperup Potion and eat their vegetables. I, on the other hand, have been known to give out biscuits from time to time.”

Poppy snorted. “Just keep trying to convince yourself, my dear,” she said. 

They came to a largish, very flat rock, and sat on the edge of it, still holding hands. The sun was descending, turning the clouds on the horizon a lovely pale orange. The tide was coming in, waves crashing closer and closer each time they rolled in. Overhead, gulls shrieked and yelled, pecking at each other and diving down to the water.

“They’re very much like students,” Minerva commented, watching one particular band of gulls mobbing another. “Extraordinarily loud, terribly rude, and alarmingly hungry.”

“At least birds don’t remove their noses in pursuit of a perfect profile,” Poppy said dolefully. 

“Is that the trend these days?” Minerva sighed. “It can’t possibly be as bad as when I was in school, and the boys had a fad of trying to change the color of their eyes.”

“I can only imagine what your poor nurse had to go through,” Poppy said with a flinch. 

Minerva chuckled. “Ah, students never mind what they put adults through,” she said, thinking of all the things she and her friends had gotten up to in school all those decades ago.

“They don’t,” Poppy said. She looked off toward the horizon. “It’s exhausting. Do you ever think about retirement, Minerva?”

“Sometimes,” Minerva said. “More frequently as years go by. It’s strange. I have a former student of mine on my staff, now.”

Poppy nodded. “You’re thinking of Longbottom? He’s been a marvelous professor.”

“Of course he has. Pomona Sprout taught him,” Minerva said. “But it’s not his competency that frightens me. It’s the idea that he was my student, and now he is a teacher.”

Poppy leaned her shoulder against Minerva’s. “People do grow up, you know.”

Minerva rested her head against Poppy’s. “I feel very old, Poppy.”

“I know,” the other witch said. “So do I.”

For a while, they simply sat together on the rock, quiet in good company. The sky was afire with the sunset now, all shades of red and orange and gold, and above them night was descending. The gulls began to disappear, going to roost. As, Minerva thought, she and Poppy should soon.

“It won’t be long before I do retire,” Poppy said suddenly. “Perhaps one more year.”

“I might agree with you,” Minerva said. “It seems like such a short time to make a decision…”

Poppy’s voice was so soft she almost couldn’t be heard above the sound of the surf. “I remember when it seemed that the summer holidays would last forever.”

“These days it seems as if they’re over before you have a chance to breathe,” Minerva said. 

“If we retire together,” Poppy said, turning Minerva’s head so that they were face to face, “we can make a summer holiday last forever.”

Minerva smiled. “That,” she said, “is a wonderful idea.”


End file.
